Commentator’s Disease

One of our readers posted a link to this Fred Reed column from a few years back (apparently), in which he points out a major blind spot among both the liberal and the conservative commentariat, as well as people in policy circles. I think he’s spot-on (and I recognize myself in the people he criticizes). Excerpt:

The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain.

They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.

Conservatives think in terms of merciless abstractions and liberals insist that everyone is equal. Not even close. Further, people with barely a high-school education and low-voltage minds regard any intellectual task with utter discouragement.

Some commentators urge letting people invest their Social Security taxes in the stock market. To them it is a question of abstract freedom and probably the Federalist papers. The commentators are smart enough to invest money. I’ll guess that at least half the population isn’t. Go into the tit bar (does it still exist) in Waldorf, Maryland, and ask the dump-truck drivers and nail-pounders what NASDAQ is.

Liberal commentators want everyone to go to college, when about a fifth of people have the brains. Conservatives think that people can rise by hard work and sacrifice as certainly many people have. Thing is, most people can’t. Commentators only see those who made it.

The tendency of the Beltway 99th to live in an imaginary world, of conservatives to think that everybody can be a Horatio Alger, of liberals to believe that inequality arises from discrimination, guarantees wretched policy. Those who can do almost anything need to recognize the existence of those who can do almost nothing. Few of the latter are parasites. The waitress has worked all her life, as has the truck driver. They ended up with nothing.

Fred, I understood Lewontin perfectly well. I understood him so well I was able to fill in the assumption he was making, that only specific, individual, physical quantities are ‘real’ or important, at least when it comes to cognitive ability. But that is an assumption that he himself would almost certainly never apply to anything scientific, and neither would you. Being liberal, you almost certainly believe in AGW, yet the evidence for such ‘climate change’ is based on averages, just as IQ is. Not only averages, but on proxy variables (after all, there is not much in the way of recorded temperature data — itself, as we have seen, an average of an underlying physical reality) such as tree rings, crop records, and ice cores. But these have to be adjusted by their observed ‘correlation’ to temperature, which are not perfect.

In short, Lewontin is rejecting standard scientific methods in the case of measurement of cognitive ability.

Noah, your narrative on changes in residential mortgage markets omits the critical factor that the new system allowed a bunch of people to make a whole bunch of money. In terms of what motivated the changes — guilt about racially disparate results of the old system or opportunities to make a whole bunch of money in a far less regulated environment — it certainly seems to me that however much one reason might have been given as the time as an explanation, it was the other that actually led regulators/legislators/business people to change the rules.

” To put it another way, why should only white folk get to live, if not in McMansions, then at least in good school districts where “there ain’t shootings every week and junkies on every corner?””

Tumarion, you discount the possibility that it is the non-white folks living in an area which turns it into what it is.

Take what was in the 1990s probably the most infamous ‘ghetto’ area in the country — South Central LA and nearby cities like Inglewood. These have calmed down quite a bit in the last decade or so, but are still plagued by relatively high rates of crime and other social disfunction, as well as poorly performing schools.

The thing is, well within living memory, the areas were overwhelmingly white. White folks lived in the exact same mid-century, single family* , detached dwellings with front and back yards that the NWA, ‘Eff the poh-lice’ lived in in the early 1990s, or the Mexicans of today. (Though of course the housing stock was newer). I haven’t been able to find the data easily, but I doubt that 1960 Inglewood, with its ’29 negros’ had anywhere near the 20 murders in the city that happened in 2010.

I’m afraid that if immigration were curtailed and industries brought back stateside, there’d be strong incentives for ramping up automation even further.

Automation is not an inherently bad thing. It has freed all of us to one degree or another from drudgery: would you want your wife scrubbing clothes by hand in a wash basin while you stand behind a horse-drawn plow? Machines that replace human labor have to be manufactured by someone, somewhere; our problem in the US now is that that someone is not us and that somewhere is not here — but that could change with the right governmental incentives (protectionism) along with some other factors more out of our control (the price of oil, wage inflation in China, etc.).

The industrial revolution moved countless millions of laborers of average and below average intelligence from the farm to the factory without anybody’s IQ changing.

how do we alleviate the unintended and disproportionate effects of these policies on some groups without tossing prudence and well-written rules out the window? … it is our responsibility, I think, to ensure safe streets, decent schools, and at least the opportunity to “get out” for those who can, to everyone

There are a bunch of cans of worms there that I will not open so as not to drift too far OT. The above hits on what I have been saying. There is a presumption in your comment that differences in rates of homeownership, and size and value of homes, among ethnic groups, even when not attributable to intentional ethnic discrimination, is a social evil that must be corrected by some sort of public action. If we were examining such disparities in a homogenous society, especially one without an extreme imbalance in the distribution of wealth (this factor being the general condition of what became the US, notably excepting the slaveholding South, from colonial times until the late twentieth century, with a bit of a breakdown during the Gilded Age) and without a history of rigid class hierarchies dating back to feudalism (America again), I have a hunch that you and most of your political persuasion would not find the situation as morally troublesome.

Also, there seems to be a (perhaps unintentional) presumption in your comments, common to liberals and Bushie “conservatives”, that the conditions of underclass non-whites can be alleviated by placing them in proximity to middle- and upper-class whites and letting the magic of cultural osmosis run its course. Experience shows otherwise. There is the old saying, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” Substitute other terms for “boy” and “country” if you prefer. Moving underclass non-whites into nice white neighborhoods does not, by and large, encourage these people to adopt bourgeois manners and mores, nor, certainly, does it improve their academic performance all that much. Rather, it just brings the neighborhoods down; once a tipping point of “diversity” is reached (varying with the cultural outlook and economic circumstances of the local whites), terminal white flight sets in, and you know the rest.

Much of recent policy directed at improving the lot of underclass minorities has not been designed with “those who can get out” of the underclass in mind, but with shuffling around underclass minorities rather randomly and wreaking havoc on whites who cannot afford to insulate themselves from diversity.

Just a small comment for consideration to remind of the ways we know IQ is more than simply genetic: maternal health, prenatal nutrition, events and type of the childbirth itself, baby nutrition, even psychological stress of infancy and early childhood- all these things truly influence humn intelligence in both brain development and functioning psychology, and in some are particular concerns among the lower or poor class of people.

“I’m afraid that if immigration were curtailed and industries brought back stateside, there’d be strong incentives for ramping up automation even further”

Noah’s absolutely right in his statement on the benefits of automation. But it is also worth noting how immigration is different from, and worse than, automation for the lower IQ among the receiving population. One reason is that immigrants seem to go into those jobs in the service economy that can’t be automated, thus cutting of natives from those opportunities. For example, mowing lawns in coastal Southern California isn’t a bad job, to my mind a better one than working at a factor, and judging from the trucks some of the gardeners drive it pays moderately well. If the Mexicans weren’t taken those positions, we might see a resumption of the traditional East to West population movement in the US — people leaving rust belt to mow lawns, clean houses, even nanny kids, of well-healed Californians.

A second reason is that machines don’t impose many externalities. Immigrants do. They have to be housed, their kids have to be fed, as often as not at taxpayer expense for a meal or two per day. They work in jobs without medical insurance, so society pays those costs as well.* Add to that more crowded roads and parks, more police and fire protection necessary to maintain per capita levels. Numerical controllers don’t impose any of those costs.

Finally, while you may not value your culture, language, and ‘look’, a lot of working class Americans — black and white and Latino for that matter — do. Very few people want their neighborhood turned into a barrio. Robots don’t do that, Mexicans do.

*(One of the big reasons Obamacare was opposed was that it was literally taking benefits from older white Americans who had paid into the system to give to younger non-white immigrants– and their kids) who hadn’t)

Capitalism doesn’t deal well with automation, because it doesn’t redistribute the leisure very well.

Automation should mean we ALL work LESS hours and get MORE pay because the machines increase the PRODUCTIVITY of the work that does get done. That would also mean we all do a share of what still needs to get done, and yeah, some work is still going to be better paid than other work, but we should all be prosperous, happy, and have lots of free time. If some of us want to spend the leisure time playing video games, while others want to be amateur astronomers, that’s life.

I’m certainly not saying all automation is bad, Noah–I don’t want to live in an Amish paradise! I’m just saying we have to be careful, as a society, how we apply it. Even the factories that produce machines use lots of robots now, for example. I’d also point out that there has been talk of the effects of automation on employment, for example here and here. Once more, I could be wrong, especially if other policies such as we’ve discussed we’re implemented. Frankly, I’m not sure anyone knows where automation is leading. I hope it’s not somewhere bad for labor, but we’ll see.

Actually, there was an article a few years ago in The Atlantic online (can’t find it right now, but it was ineresting) about how moving people out of ghettos just shifted the locus of crime. Merely shuffling people about is, as you say, useless–as an Appalachian, I can say it doesn’t work with “white trash”, either. In fact, you mistake what I was getting at, since I wasn’t suggesting that. What I was suggesting is finding some way of making underclass neighborhoods, minority or otherwise, better places to live, and to find ways of supporting bourgeois mores.

After all, the underclass, minority or not, are citizens, too, and deserve safe neighborhoods and good schools, just like anyone else. To take the attitude some do of saying in effect “To hell with them–they’re hopeless and will never change. Just keep ’em away from me and mine,” is in my view immoral. I don’t claim to have a raft of magic solutions, but I think something needs to be done.

This is, if anything, an argument for at least some of the educated/elite sending their children to public schools where they will constantly rub shoulders with people of very different intellectual and economic categories. Ditto with military service, where you really do run into and have to learn to work with (not just coexist with) the typical Hollywood cast of mixed characters – gangsters, teetotallers, hicks, nerds, ranchers, suburbanites, rebels against hippie parents, coal miner’s sons, missionary’s kids, patriots, the formerly homeless, the simply bored, Southerners, Mormons, Puerto Ricans, Pacific Islanders, and even a few benighted New Englanders. This experience gives you a more realistic idea of how differently different types of people can operate, but also how it can all work out beautifully (or not as the case may be.) Unfortunately, both public education and military service have gone rather out of favor with the ruling classes. To our collective loss, it would seem, judging by the distinct lack of brilliance and moral clarity we’ve gotten out of them in the last decade or so.